There exist certain key issues to modern industrial automation as modularity, reusability, portability, flexibility, extendibility and reconfigurability to create optimally coordinated automation solution for manufacturing plants. This will feature the operating companies to react fast and flexible to changed customer demands. An appropriate way to realize these issues is an object-oriented control implementation, which has been quite common since the late 90s. This work is focused on the upcoming standard IEC 61499, which defines an object-oriented and event-driven software model, which can be realised by any hardware the engineer prefers. Furthermore, the control implementation is application-oriented and all parts are mapped to available control devices later on. Thus, it is possible to replace one device by another by easily remapping the application. But, does this possibility need certain care during the development of the control application and how could a control engineer be supported to prove the correctness of the plant behaviour in any case? To answer this question the formal model discrete timed Net Condition/Event Systems is used in this work to model in a modular manner the control system and the plant. Both models are connected in closed loop to perform a reachability analysis. It is shown, how a control engineer can examine in a graphical manner the system behaviour for all possible cases by selecting interesting trajectories and drawing them as Gantt-Charts. Since the model of the plant incorporates all sensors and actuators, the state of the corresponding places can be included into the Gantt-Chart.Even if the control engineer has no deep knowledge about the used formal model, this systematic and tool supported way ensures the possibility to analyse the system behaviour in any case, if he changes the control application or remaps it. This will reduce downtimes during production changes and new plant can be brought faster into service.

This book provides a concise introduction to the main concepts and models defined in the standard for modelling distributed control systems for use in factory automation.

The 2005 Virtual International Conference on IPROMS took place on the Internet between 4 and 15 July 2005. IPROMS 2005 was an outstanding success. During the Conference, some 4168 registered delegates and guests from 71 countries participated in the Conference, making it a truly global phenomenon. This book contains the Proceedings of IPROMS 2005. The 107 peer-reviewed technical papers presented at the Conference have been grouped into twelve sections, the last three featuring contributions selected for IPROMS 2005 by Special Sessions chairmen: - Collaborative and Responsive Manufacturing Systems- Concurrent Engineering- E-manufacturing, E-business and Virtual Enterprises- Intelligent Automation Systems- Intelligent Decision Support Systems- Intelligent Design Systems- Intelligent Planning and Scheduling Systems- Mechatronics- Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems- Tangible Acoustic Interfaces (Tai Chi)- Innovative Production Machines and Systems- Intelligent and Competitive Manufacturing Engineering

IEC 61499 is the standard for distributed control systems that follows on from the IEC 61131 standard for programmable logic controllers (PLC). This book is a practical guide for component-based development of distributed embedded and control systems as proposed by this international standard.

Computer control systems are developing rapidly, therefore an insight of the latest trends in the design of control systems will increase the success of future developments. This publication brings together the latest key papers on research and development trends in this field, allowing both academics and industrial practioners to find new insights and gain from each other's experience.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems held in September 2007. The 39 full papers were selected from among 63 submissions. They are organized into topical sections covering theoretical and methodological issues, algorithms and technologies, implementation and validation, applications, and supply chain management.